Evidence

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon on October 22, 1991, two high school students, Chedell Williams and Zahra Howard, ascended the steps of the Fern Rock train station in North Philadelphia, planning to take a train back to their homes. Seemingly out of nowhere, two men appeared, blocked the girls’ way up to the station, and demanded Chedell’s earrings. Terrified, the girls bolted in opposite directions. The two men followed Chedell. They soon caught her and tore out her earrings. Then “[o]ne of the men grabbed her, held a silver handgun to her neck, and shot her.” The perpetrators fled. Chedell was pronounced dead within the hour.

Police soon focused their investigation on James Dennis, who lived relatively close to the train station in the Abbotsford Homes projects. Detectives would later explain that they heard rumors that Dennis was involved in the shooting, though they were at that time “unable to identify the source of the rumors.” The detectives obtained preliminary descriptions of the perpetrators from three eyewitnesses. These initial descriptions did not align well with Dennis’s actual appearance. Nonetheless, a few eyewitnesses identified Dennis during subsequent photo lineups, live lineups, and the trial. In presenting the government’s case, the prosecution relied heavily on these eyewitness identifications. Dennis was found guilty of “first-degree murder, robbery, carrying a firearm without a license, criminal conspiracy, and possession of an instrument of a crime.” He was sentenced to death.

This Note seeks to address how the sprawl of GPS technology in our lives has permeated into the courts and affected the rights of criminal defendants. The first Part provides general background about the technology and its broader role in the court system, while the second Part examines GPS and the law. The second Part will look at the rules of evidence and the hurdles––however minimal––that GPS evidence may need to overcome when admitted at trial. Because GPS technology, while common, is still subject to errors and tampering, the evidence should be required to be properly authenticated. A GPS record can be––and has been––viewed as a kind of a statement, reporting where a particular person was at a particular time. For this reason, courts have considered the evidence through hearsay analysis and admitted it through the business records exception. Additionally, the second Part discusses the constitutional issues that arise with the introduction of GPS evidence. Specifically, the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment guarantees a criminal defendant the right to cross-examine the person who makes a report submitted at trial. GPS data can be considered a statement against a criminal defendant, about where the defendant was at a particular time––e.g., when a crime was being committed. The issue becomes whether a criminal defendant is entitled to “confront” the makers of these statements. Finally, the third Part of this Note concludes with concerns of how to properly deal with GPS tracking technology, considering how far it can reach, in light of the general public’s seeming non-concern with the level of government use of it. The fact that most of us carry GPS-enabled smartphones in our pockets every day gives rise to questions about the government’s ability to track us and what procedural safeguards should be maintained when evidence from these devices is admitted against an individual at trial.

The shortcomings of forensic evidence in the criminal justice system are now well known. But most scholarly attention has concentrated on “first-generation” forensic techniques such as hair or pattern analysis, bite marks, firearms, and ballistics. Moreover, most of the attention has centered on the investigative process, specifically the collection and analysis of evidence. This Essay turns the critical lens on scientific evidence in a different direction. It focuses on “second-generation” technologies—such as location tracking, biometrics, digital forensics, and other database-driven techniques, and it scrutinizes the adjudicative system—the “bail to jail” stream—rather than the investigative process. Ultimately, this Essay argues that almost every aspect of the adversarial process, as currently conceived, is ill-suited to ensuring the integrity of high-tech evidence. Specifically, the adversarial model demands individualized rather than collective inquiries, embraces secrecy rather than transparency, and privileges viva voce evidence over other forms of fact-gathering. Furthermore, it heavily depends upon the skill of counsel and in-court confrontation rather than out-of-court oversight and structural reform to address problems related to evidentiary integrity, and adopts rigid rules of finality grounded in part on an assumption that proof is always inconclusive. This Essay concludes that the eighteenth-century model of justice may be ill-suited to twenty-first-century evidence, and offers recommendations for a more reliable factfinding system.

When the body of a deceased woman was found near the Mississippi River close to Baton Rouge in July 2002, DNA retrieved from the crime scene was linked to the murders of two other women in the area, and multiple law enforcement agencies subsequently began an aggressive search for the serial killer. Using witness statements and an FBI profile, the FBI, the Louisiana State Police, and the police and sheriff’s departments of Baton Rouge determined that their suspect was a young white man. After a fourth murder believed to have been committed by the same perpetrator occurred in December 2002, officials intensified their hunt for the killer by spending over one million dollars to collect and test the DNA of some 1200 white men in the area, but they made no matches and consequently had no leads.

In March 2003, the investigators crossed paths with molecular biologist Tony Frudakis of the company DNAPrint Genomics, who claimed that he could ascertain the suspect’s social race by testing the crime scene DNA for 176 specific genetic markers that disclose information about physical traits. Frudakis said that because certain markers are found predominantly in people of African, Indo-European, Native American, or South Asian roots, he could analyze their frequencies and predict the suspect’s ancestry with 99 percent accuracy, and then infer social race from this ancestry finding. Initially skeptical of the science, officials sent Frudakis DNA samples from twenty individuals with known racial designations—and upon blind testing the samples, Frudakis correctly identified the race of each individual.

Even more intriguing were the results of Frudakis’s analysis of the Baton Rouge serial killer’s DNA. Using a test he called DNAWitness, Frudakis concluded that the suspect’s “biogeographical ancestry” was 85 percent Sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American, which left, in his words, “no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all.”

Consider the following hypothetical: Two businesses—X, a software company, and Y, a retailer—reach a typical agreement regarding a software license. After extended negotiations, a written, integrated agreement finalizes the deal; it states that X will license software to Y and provide related hosting and technical support services. It does not include, nor did the two parties ever discuss, implementation of the software. Some time after the agreement was made, Y attempts to compel X to implement the software. Y later argues in court that X made fraudulent oral promises that induced Y to sign the written agreement. Y claims that X additionally agreed to provide both a total cost of ownership guarantee, including implementation, and the assistance of its consulting and development personnel to implement the software. Y’s lawyers correctly realize that, in California, the courts have allowed extrinsic evidence of fraudulent promises when those promises are consistent with or independent of the written agreement, notwithstanding the Parol Evidence Rule (“PER”). Thus, while X can present its best argument that the promise to implement the software would directly contradict or vary the terms of the limited licensing contract, the outcome in court is still unpredictable. Unsuspecting X is in danger of being forced to bear a substantial burden for which it never intended to contract.

McLaughlin v. Phillip Morris USA, Inc., has been certified as a nationwide class action on behalf of an estimated 50 million “light” cigarette smokers. Plaintiffs seek more than $280 billion in damages, to be trebled to over $800 billion. In certifying this mass tort, District Judge Jack B. Weinstein announced his plan to completely abandon individualized adjudication in favor of aggregate factual determinations based on evidence from statistical samples. Prior to McLaughlin, at least two federal trial judges had permitted the use of sampled evidence in major consolidated or class action trials, but both included some adjudication of individual claims. In McLaughlin, Judge Weinstein’s plan would entirely eliminate proof of individual class member claims in the face of the overwhelming cost of gathering such evidence from tens of millions of plaintiffs. The central issue in the interlocutory appeal now before the Second Circuit is the legality of Judge Weinstein’s plan to use sampled evidence to determine whether the plaintiff class members relied on representations by the defendants that “light” cigarettes were less harmful than regular cigarettes, and, if so, to determine the aggregate amount of damages.

In this Article, we address and defend Judge Weinstein’s controversial proposal to statistically sample evidence, rather than to obtain evidence on an individualized, case-by-case basis. We endorse his view that statistical sampling combined with other evidence “is a necessary and pragmatic evidentiary approach that reflects full due process in this and many other mass tort cases.”